ECO:nomics: Your Next Car Will Drive Itself

3/21/2013 11:28PM

J. Christian Gerdes, who works on the technologies required for driverless vehicles, and Sunil Paul, who’s smartphone app company connects drivers with passengers looking for a ride, talk WSJ’s Joe White about the future of personal transportation and it’s carbon footprint.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

I ... Chris disparaged tell us what you're doing it scampered up around autonomous driving and ... driving to college ... Sauron Tynan is shining Friday connected to create a robotic race ... so we are ... a brief refueling fires in a way that makes me deeply apologetic in from and is proud ... of that the reason we're doing it is to Sichuan understand ... how we get in on time as car to drive limits of its capabilities like the best human drivers ... to race for Knight is an outstanding deal leaves the friction between the high road to go that's ... where the harness the same capability to the state ... it's our ultimate objective is to ... drive as well as the very best human drivers and eliminate any accident they can physically be avoided and call ... Sunil Paul tell us about SideCar and and and and ... what you're doing with the company ... now thank you ... ALM sidecar is a new company ... we leverage the platform of smartphones I Phones and reds ... to create this ... new capability of use and right match ... it would only allows the everyday writers and everyday drivers to connect up with ... with each other ... on a platform ... I'm yet to get around the city and were in nine cities ... from us ... the book the underlying resources are leveraging as the hours in which cars normally sit around waiting for people to drive ... it ... as read most of the time right most cars sit around for ... more than ninety percent of the time ... despite last night was waiting for their masters ... it will get that that I think what people want to know because they've they've seen the publicity around the Goebel self driving cars on them some people may have seen ... videos of Audi's car the climb like the goddess of which I think your group work with ... it ... aam ... but tell us ... how far away are we from ... um commercially available ... viable ... um self driving car and I guess the one that's been one ask the question specifically around the technology ... to recover summit human factors and that just on the technology how far away are we sure lower Many faction and hung in the mid three year time horizon so for a car that would ... drive myself in limited circumstances such as ... those that are carrying to begin with would be France's a freeway said a ... traffic jam Sanaa Rio so ... here below the posted speed limit ... for awhile and hard to maintain its position in the lane ... I could adjust distance you could ... do something else which is not necessarily ... on yet defined as to how much you take your attention off of the road ... ah but so many factors can talk about these systems in a very short time frame about three years about three years ... to ... affect ... them ... Melanie get to the human factors side which is that ... one of the issues is as I understand from from looking at this and that's really not soft it is one of them is this liability ... and now it's pretty simple if if if if ... the driver ... is inattentive and causes a crash the drivers probably at ... fault ... aam ... what's your of what would you make of the stated that the most of the legal issues and and some human factors issues around the self driving car ... I think the manufacturers right now are trying to see ... how much can you introduce without changing her ... so friends and are still in in control the car you're still ... responsible ... the car can actually provide some these assistant features during a traffic jam ... totally irresponsible for laundering surroundings making sure ... everything's okay now clearly there's ... there's a limited benefit ... to dive in terms that if you have to pay attention ... than what's the point then maybe you my one and I can just go ahead and drive ... and ultimately if the car is doing good job of driving itself ... and in you begin to smell feel very reliant on it ... what's the fermented from sneaking out the cell phone ... it ... is you're talking to people about this technology ... aam ... what is it that that either the company is that you work with more people than you encounter ... as you talk about this in a public about ... what is it that people want from a self driving car ... I think he would like the ability to just let the car drive into something else to somewhere within and because they whether that be ... on the in text hinges in some ways pull out of the driving ... situation seems to be a very desirable ... feature and of course that ... raises all these issues once you ... do think the driver fully out into ... the loop ... can you get them back if the car sees the situation they can handle ... it as a safety critical situation I think it's highly unlikely he would design a system ... that someone says your wheels fairness ... of buyout but the other hand you know you do have enough time ... to to say the understand what's going on I found myself in the middle of you know Thanksgiving day parade I was not programmed for this ... round and India will pull over to the sign that says additionally this this class of issues when Kenyan transfer control back to the driver in a free app to get